


Did We Meet Somewhere Before?

by georgygirl



Series: Across the Universe [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bitterness, Depressed Steve Rogers, Drama, M/M, Memories, Minor Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, POV Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Has PTSD, Steve Rogers Swears, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 19:31:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20179546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/georgygirl/pseuds/georgygirl
Summary: A coda toIf Only in My Dreams— Steve wakes up seventy years later and discovers sometimes the past is better left forgotten. Especially when the future's not what you thought you were promised.*REPOST*





	Did We Meet Somewhere Before?

**Author's Note:**

> Another repost of a story published prior, this time from 2016. So, again, formatting issues are possible.
> 
> Like I said, this one's a coda to _If Only in My Dreams_, so it will probably make absolutely no sense unless you've read that one.
> 
> Fair warning: Steve's kind of bitter in this one. That's what tends to happen when your dreams have been shattered (or you think they've been shattered, at any rate). He also forms some opinions of Tony that he will come to regret later on.

* * *

He could still picture the moment — still see it clear as day as if it were playing out in front of him; that moment he realized his entire world had been stolen clear out from under him.

"_You've been asleep, Cap, for almost seventy years_," Colonel Fury had said, the swirl of an unfamiliar Times Square surrounding him, dozens of agents standing in wait should he even think to attempt to run again.

"_I had a date_," was all he could think to say to that.

What else could he say? What else was he _expected_ to say? He'd crashed a plane in the Arctic in 1945, convinced he was giving his life for the greater good, and now; here he was, in New York, in the year 2012 — _two thousand and twelve! _The future. The future with all its bells and whistles and gadgets and gizmos. The future with its giant screens (in color!) and even faster pace than he'd remembered — with its never-ceasing forms of communication. The future. The bright, sparkling land of opportunity that he and Bucky used to dream about. The future, and all he wanted was to close his eyes and go back to the ice, go back to the grave he'd been stolen from, go back to where he was or had the potential to be _somewhat _useful.

The future. Good God, how he hated it.

He sat at the table in the small Brooklyn apartment the organization that called itself SHIELD had set up for him. He couldn't complain; it was actually a nice joint — much nicer than the dump he'd lived in before the war. It was clean and seemingly well-built and had good lighting. Certainly not the tenement-living he'd done as a kid.

(That building wasn't even there any longer. He'd checked.)

Like a glutton for punishment, he sat there and once more read through the files SHIELD — or was it Agent…Coulson? Was that his name? Anyway, the files some agent had given him to look over — things to catch up on, things to file away for future reference. Though he knew the documents by heart, he pored yet again through the official records for his men — his Commandos — hoping for something to change with this latest scan-through. But the word 'Deceased' continued to stare back at him on every single file, mocking him as though to say, _Just __like __you're __supposed to be._

(Except Peggy's, but Peggy was...not a path he wanted to travel down at this moment — not when he could still remember how her lips felt on his and the hopeful promise of a date that was never to be. He wondered briefly if she went anyway, even if just to have a drink in his memory. He couldn't even go and do as much — toast to a what-might-have-been. The club wasn't there anymore. He'd checked.)

But of course they would be 'deceased.' He was almost seventy years into the future. By rights _he _<strike>wanted to be</strike> should have been dead, too.

Actually, he _had _been dead. He'd been very happily dead, frozen and buried in his cold, dark grave like he should have been from the moment he'd been born.

(He'd been a…sickly child, to say the least. And a sickly teenager. And a sickly adult.)

But he'd been dead and fine with it until they'd gone and disturbed him, rattled his bones and dragged him back to the land of the living. And now—

And now he was expected — what they wanted of him — was to join some group of super- powered individuals to help bring to justice some trickster alien from another world. It was a testament to what he'd seen in the war that he didn't just laugh in their faces and hightail it the hell out of there the moment they'd told him that. No, he didn't believe this trickster was a _god _as everyone else seemed to, but he could admit that he had powers above and beyond what he knew the average — or even above-average — human to possess. He wasn't sure _how _they were supposed to stop this nutcase. He wasn't even sure _how _he was expected to lead a team he himself had not chosen. He'd personally chosen all his Commandos. He'd trusted them, believed in them, knew they'd have his and each other's backs as much as he had theirs.

But _this_ group? He didn't know this group from Adam, and a piece of paper in a file was nothing compared to actual combat experience — fighting side-by-side as brothers-in-arms. Not to say he _couldn't _forge a team from this list of names — he'd had tougher challenges — but he'd have felt a lot better about the whole thing if he could have at least _met _some of these people beforehand and judged their ability and their character before offering them a spot on the team.

But then, it wasn't _his_ team, and he wasn't the one that had pulled the team together to begin with. Colonel Fury had been the one to do that, hand-picking them for something he called the 'Avengers Initiative.'

(Colonel Phillips had been a hard-ass, and even he'd let Steve pick his own damned team. Probably because he knew Steve would have done it with or without his permission.)

As far as Fury's team went, there was a red-headed agent — an attractive woman, he could admit — named 'Romanoff,' who was ex-KGB (he'd had to look up what that was). There was a miserable-looking agent (maybe he just photographed poorly?) named 'Barton' that was a master archer and had unfortunately been compromised by the trickster. Then there was a fella named 'Banner' that…had a condition, of some kind, as far as he could tell. There was intel included about this trickster's brother, named 'Thor,' who SHIELD had determined was not a threat but could potentially come in handy when it came to rounding up the trickster.

And lastly, there was the man — no, not the actual man, but a man wearing the face of someone he'd dreamt about once upon a time. It was uncanny the resemblance, as was the name.

Tony Stark. Son of Howard Stark.

He'd blocked that dream from his memory — a stupid, confusing dream he'd had one Christmas Eve that had made no sense whatsoever. It was a fantasy, as it turned out, his inner-most desires coming to life in the form of a wonderful and picturesque dreamscape.

And yet, the man he'd dreamt about bore such a striking resemblance to the one now staring up at him from the SHIELD dossier that he could be forgiven for thinking they were one in the same.

Well, the hair was a little different. Longer. If he was remembering his Tony (_his_ _Tony _— his imagined fantasy more like) correctly, the 5'9" was a bit generous.

Then again, maybe that was the right measurements for this Tony.

Because this Tony was _not _his Tony in any way, shape, or form. _This _Tony was an egotistical jerk that was in it for himself and himself only. He was smarmy, manipulative, and took absolutely _nothing _seriously. He'd watched the way he'd thumbed his nose at every Congressional hearing he'd been forced to attend — like it was beneath him and he had better things to do with his time. One in particular stood out to him — the way he'd stared right into the camera and said something about how he could always be counted on to pleasure himself. And then there were the…other… videos he'd found. He wasn't sure he was supposed to. The fella at SHIELD that had given him the computer and the info had also given him explicit details on exactly which 'sites' were approved for visiting. Unsurprisingly, those didn't net him that much information — he had a feeling they were 'approved' in that they would tell him only what SHIELD wanted him to hear — and so he'd snuck off to the library and accessed the so-called 'world wide web' from the anonymity of a guest account (and with the aid of a very nice librarian), reading up on everything he could click on.

(There was...a lot of pornography, as it turned out. And he hadn't even been looking for it! Honest!)

That included everything that wasn't the squeaky-clean account of the man SHIELD had listed simply as an advisor. Brilliant though this Tony Stark may have been, his equally flippant and narcissistic attitude toward anything he saw as beneath him was not worth his time in the least.

Still, it was hard to ignore the resemblance, the name, the fact that he was _Howard's son_. He wasn't quite sure if the voice was similar or not. He thought maybe it was, but then again, he was trying to remember back <strike>several months</strike> seventy years. And not to someone he'd actually met but someone he'd _dreamt _about. He wasn't even sure how that was possible. Had their personalities been similar in any way, he might actually have begun to wonder if he truly had somehow had a vision of the future — of _his_ future. But it was so hard to reconcile the, well, _louse_ that he saw before him with the tender and adorable sweetheart of his dream. Not to mention the fact that he was absolutely convinced this Tony Stark should not be entrusted with the care of a potted plant let alone a child while <strike>his Tony other Tony</strike> _imaginary _Tony was an absolute natural with the stubborn little toddler that bore such a resemblance to him.

(Why couldn't he have woken up there, in that universe, once again? Someplace where, if he wasn't exactly _useful_, he was at least _wanted?_)

Knowing what (little) he did of how the universe worked, and understanding that the world he called 'home' had been visited by beings from foreign worlds (outer space, he might have called it once upon a time), he wondered if, with that _dream, _there was some possible way he'd tapped into some kind of parallel world — a world that was similar to but not quite his. He couldn't think of any other way to explain it or describe it.

It wasn't just the personality that was wrong. It was the other, smaller things as well. This Tony Stark was supposedly in a relationship with a stunningly beautiful woman named Pepper Potts, who was the CEO of Stark Industries — Howard's old company — and a highly successful one at that. He understood their portfolio to be quite impressive, whatever that meant, the company undergoing a new era of growth and prosperity and innovation under her leadership.

(To be honest, he wondered what such a dame saw in a reprobate like Tony Stark. Evidently she suffered fools gladly in a way that someone like Peggy…God, _Peggy_…never would.)

This Tony also had some generator of some kind powering his heart. Product of an ordeal he'd undergone several years ago as the prisoner of some band of mercenaries. He didn't really have all the details on that, though at the least he could say that from what he understood, it was the kind of experience one usually learned from — the kind of experience that would get a man to turn over a new leaf. He didn't know what this Tony had gotten out of that experience, but it certainly didn't appear to be anything other than a weaponized metal suit he taunted the government with and used to 'privatize' peace, whatever that meant.

(Come to think of it, hadn't his Tony had some odd surgical scars somewhere in the vicinity of where he understood this Tony's — pacemaker? Is that what they called it? — to be? Had his Tony had one of those, too? Had his Tony even been real?)

He gazed at the photograph of the handsome man in the dossier file, unable to understand how he could have imagined the details so perfectly but gotten the big picture so utterly and embarrassingly wrong. He almost hated the man he saw staring back at him — hated him for something that wasn't even his fault. Yes, he was a largely contemptible person that had no business pretending he was a 'hero' (he wasn't; far from it), but it wasn't his fault that he wasn't the ideal Steve had dreamt about once upon a time. He hadn't even been _born _when Steve had — somehow — had that dream (or whatever it was). He may have been a wretch, but it wasn't his fault he wasn't the man Steve had once fantasized about (to put it mildly; he still remembered the…mess…he'd made of himself in that bathroom — the mess Tony had unthinkingly and unblinkingly cleaned up).

(Which brought him to another thing — _this_ Tony Stark was much more inclined to make messes than clean them up. That he could figure, other people had, over the years, had to clean up his messes for him. He, quite clearly, couldn't be bothered.)

Forget the 'almost.' He did. God help him, he hated this man. He hated him for what he wasn't and what he had never pretended to be. He hated him for not being what Steve had wanted and hoped him to be the moment he'd seen the name, never mind the photograph, in the file. Waking up in the future — being pulled from his grave (God, please, let him go back there) — was bad enough, but he thought there'd been a slight glimmer of hope the moment he'd come to terms with the fact that he was nearly seventy years in the future. He still remembered what that Tony — his Tony (no, _not _'his' Tony; if 'his' Tony even existed, it was somewhere else in time and space) — had said to him just as he was falling asleep.

_See you in seventy, babe_.

He supposed that should have been his first red flag. Maybe that Tony had just rounded up, but so far as he understood it, he'd been gone for just over sixty-seven years, not seventy. Still, the moment he'd understood himself to be several decades into the future, he'd thought, perhaps, that it was true, that everything Tony had told him and shown him was true — or would be true. Yes, he'd lost his entire world, but what he would get in return — a love unlike anything he'd ever known, a _family_ — would be more than worth the ache of pain and loss. And he'd believed that—

Until cold, brutal awareness had slapped him so hard in the face he'd almost gotten whiplash. Whatever he'd dreamt had not been his future, and whoever that Tony Stark was that had wormed his way into his heart in just under a day was _not _this Tony Stark that he, thankfully, wouldn't be expected to work with. This Tony was a self-described lone gunslinger (Christ, one of _those _types) that didn't play well with others. The character — or maybe it was more the _alias_ — was the same, that of 'Iron Man,' but the Iron Man of that other world, so far as he had been told, wasn't just an 'Avenger' (it _had _to have been some parallel universe!) but supposedly helped _lead _that team. This Tony Stark couldn't even be bothered to lead his own company. Which was just as well. As far as he could figure, that Miss Potts seemed to be a much more capable and talented leader than Tony Stark had ever been. This Tony Stark wasn't even trusted to be on the team let alone be entrusted with its function and mission and purpose, and quite frankly, Steve didn't _want _him on the team. Tony Stark was the very definition of a liability in the field. He wasn't sure anything would ever convince him otherwise.

A parallel universe — like something out of some science fiction mag or some pulp fiction thing. Crazy as it sounded, that was the only explanation that made sense. Because this Tony Stark was nothing like _his_ Tony Stark — his tender, gentle, caring, and funny Tony that looked at him like no one else ever had. It was a dream, and a pipe dream at that, something never to come to pass, something to be left to the wastebin of history like everything else from what he had once considered his life.

He closed up the file on Tony Stark and sat back in his chair, staring at the peeks of early- morning sunlight slipping in through the blinds. Whatever that dream had been, like he'd told himself once upon a time, it wasn't worth dwelling on a fiction, especially now that he knew how fictional it really was.

He pushed himself to his feet and grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. He threaded his arms through the sleeves and grabbed his keys from the counter. They'd be coming to collect him for the mission soon, but he still had some time to himself. Maybe he'd go get a coffee. Maybe he'd grab a newspaper. Maybe he'd step in front of a bus.

He took one last look at the table where the SHIELD dossier sat, and he closed his eyes and pictured his Tony one last time — the way he smiled, the petulant tilt of his head when he'd pointed out the difference in their heights, the soft and tender way he tended to his daughter — and finally closed that book for good, swallowing down the memories along with any hopes and dreams that he might have had that _maybe, _just _maybe..._

He opened his eyes once more and stepped out into the hallway, the money SHIELD had given him burning a hole in his pocket. Maybe he'd treat himself to breakfast. Maybe he'd catch a quick movie. Maybe he'd jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

In any case, he was not ever being put into a position to deal with Tony Goddamned Stark, that was for damned sure.

**Author's Note:**

> And then they meet and measure dicks and fight off an alien horde and forge a friendship and fall in love and get married and live happily ever after.


End file.
